The Birth And Growth Of NATO

On 4th April 1949, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was constituted. Initially it had twelve founding member countries, which are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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North Atlantic Treaty is the legal basis of NATO. The Foreign Ministers from the 12 countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty at the Departmental Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on 4th April 1949. The treaty is also known as the Washington Treaty. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere.

NATO's headquarter is in Brussels, Belgium. NATO headquarters is the political and administrative centre of the alliance. The present Secretary General of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg. He has been serving as the 13th Secretary General of NATO since 2014.

The Idea Behind NATO

From NATO's website we can come to know that within five months of the signing ceremony, the treaty was ratified by the parliaments of all 12 countries, sealing their membership. NATO can be described as a collective security system, where the organisation's independent member states mutually agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties.

It was conceived to provide collective security against the then Soviet Union in the backdrop of the hostile cold war environment between the two superpowers. The alliance however is very much there even more than three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and has the history of being involved in military operations in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.